Reading Canon DSLR shutter counts

Ever wanted to know the shuttercount of your Canon DSLR? I did for my 7D. So I set off on the internet to find a way to do this. This blog post describes the how and what of my “quest”.

Where you cannot get it from

Shutter counts on Canon DSLRs is a little hard to get to. The shutter count is definitely NOT included in the EXIF data that is included in the shots made. It is also unavailable from the 7D’s menu. OF course Canon has a utility that displays the shutter count right? Wrong. No Canon tool I could find retrieves the shutter count. I’m sure they have these tools at service centers, but not publicly available.

In order to get to the shutter count, you need to connect your DSLR via USB to your computer, but then what?

Online programs

One I remembered from a previous quest was www.eoscount.com . This website installs an active-X plugin into your browser that in turn will read the info from the first detected camera connected to your machine. Active-X means Internet Explorer, no other browser can do this. I had a little problem getting this running, but after manually downloading and installing the Active-X component I got everything running on my 64-bit Windows 7.

Where this program used to display the shutter count, it now said “AVAILABLE”. Now what’s that supposed to mean? It means you need to pay (and even that did not work properly on the website):

I did not even bother testing this one, as it is so user unfriendly. I was looking for a simple tool that would do the trick. Finally I found exactly this, at www.eosmsg.com:

Look familiar? I guess the code is the same or almost the same as the one from eoscount.com. But the nice thing: eosmsg.com is free!

Even better, at eosmsg.com they also have a standalone version of the software, so you do not specifically need Internet Explorer. The standalone version looks like this:

Crude but effective – The standalone version of eosmsg.com’s tool to read shuttercounts.

Crude but effective – A simple tool which simply does the trick!

Why isn’t my Canon DSLR supported by these tools?

Unfortunately not all Canon DSLRs are supported. My old EOS 400D will not work using these tools. Why not? I’m guessing because the 400D has a DIGIC II chip. All cameras with a DIGIC III chip or newer appear to be supported.

So how to read the shutter counts of the older DSLRs? Actually I do not know, I’m not even sure these cameras track the number of shutter actuations…

Canon DSLR shutter life expectancy

Canon specifies a number of shutter actuations a DSLR should be expected to be able to perform throughout their lives. This is different for every model. In general, the more high-end the camera is, the more shutter actuation’s it can handle:

Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT / 350D

50,000

Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi / 400D

50,000

Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi / 450D

100,000

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i / 500D

100,000

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T2i / 550D

100,000?

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T3i / 600D

100,000?

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T4i / 650D

100,000?

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T5i / 700D

100,000?

Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS / 1000D

100,000

Canon EOS Digital Rebel T3 / 1100D

100,000?

Canon EOS 20D

50,000

Canon EOS 30D

100,000

Canon EOS 40D

100,000

Canon EOS 50D

100,000

Canon EOS 60D

100,000

Canon EOS 5D

100,000

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

150,000

Canon EOS 5D Mark III

150,000

Canon EOS 7D

150,000

Canon EOS 1D Mark II N

200,000

Canon EOS 1D Mark III

300,000

Canon EOS 1D Mark IV

300,000

Canon EOS 1DS Mark II

200,000

Canon EOS 1DS Mark III

300,000

Canon EOS 1DX

400,000

Shutter count life expectancy of various Canon DSLR models. This list is an average, unconfirmed, and ‘?’ entries are guesstimates

Remember, these values are average life expectancy of the shutters in various models. Values in this table are used by Canon, the values with a question mark (?) behind them are “guesstimates”; given the line of cameras these values make sense, but they are unconfirmed.